A/N: I got latched onto this series in a bad way after seeing the movie. I've read all three books but somehow the movie managed to stir more feelings than I ever had reading all three of them combined! I also intend to write something for the Careers, those psychotic messed-up children, but for now, some Foxface introspection! Constructive criticism is awesome.
the hunger games
foxface.
"isolation"
rated pg-13.
she simply has to do it alone.
Her name is not important.
She is the only daughter of two nuclear power plant workers in District 5. When she is a week old they both die in an accident when she is screaming in a grandmother's lap. She becomes another mouth to feed and so she is given to a community home, and despite the best efforts of the supervisors to fatten her up, she will always remain small for her age.
She doesn't talk much. She learned as a child that a loud voice was silenced with a shh, that laughter could be silenced with a slap, that knives could cut anything into pieces. That nothing could compare to the power of silence or the sting of a blade.
At five years old she starts stealing knives from the kitchen to throw at one of the old gnarled trees in the back of the home. She's seen the Games through the fingers of her caretakers, but more importantly, she's seen how happy the victors look. They are always well-fed. They are always smiling. They are always stunning, works of art come to life.
She has to be one of them.
She is fifteen years old when her name is called to represent District 5 for the 74th Annual Hunger Games. She walks up in a sort of haze and holds out her hand for the Capitol representative to pick it up. He is a flamboyant man, with purple on his eyes and teal on his lips. He takes hold of her small wrist and she can already see him thinking, No, this won't do at all.
When they have boarded the train, she throws a knife from her thigh at him. The blade grazes his cheek and lands in the wall next to his suddenly colorless face.
She smiles and leaves while he's busy grumbling about manners.
(Later she will learn from her mentor that five was too late, that the Careers in Districts 1 and 2 pick up weapons at three.
"But we'll make a victor of you yet, sweetheart," she will say, though her eyes are far away, her voice is stunted with morphling, and her heart is fainter than it ought to be.
My mentor sees a sun that is different from mine, she will suppose, and she will be right because she always is, and she will sit there alongside her guide, holding her arm, rooting her in what's real.)
She does not care to remember the boy she came to the Capitol with. They are of an age, perhaps one or two years apart, but he is not catching enough to remember nor attractive enough to play with. They do not say a single word to each other, and the Capitol man whispers, Between you and me, it'd be better if you don't get too attached.
She is not quick to speak when they meet to discuss her angle, but eventually the Capitol man snaps and demands that she does. When she does she informs him that he can go fuck himself in the common speech as well as four forgotten languages, tongues once called Spanish, Italian, French, and German.
"Where did you—?"
She only smiles. And refuses to say anything more.
"Smart, then," he decides at once. "There's your angle. You will be untouchable. Elusive. Sly." He struggles for the words. She wonders if he's ever talked this long before. "Like an ermine."
"A fox," she corrects him, the sun caught in her bright red hair. She is no weasel.
The night before the interviews, the boy from her district steals into her bedroom and speaks to her. His first words are to inform her that he is a virgin. He does not want to die one. Couldn't she do this for him, just this one favor, just once? Because she's going to win, and he isn't. Everyone knows it, everyone doesn't tell him but he knows.
He says: "You've always been so beautiful. Please." He is on the edge of tears.
She sighs and pulls her dark green nightgown up over her head.
When she is speaking with Caesar she is herself, and that is a strange thing for the host after basking in the sparkle of 1, the brutality of 2, the shyness of 3, and the seductiveness of 4. She sits in her teal gown, all grace and silence, and when Caesar tries to coax her into speaking, he has to try very hard before she finally graces him with her thoughts.
She is very careful about what she says and refuses to speak about those dear to her, because they are all dead, and the caretakers in the home were never family, could never be family.
She is unassuming and isn't noteworthy, and her plan works out perfectly when the girl from 12 is bright and lively in her red flaming dress, ever-shining.
Katniss Everdeen, Caesar Flickerman calls her. The girl on fire!
He may as well have painted a target on 12's back.
She allows herself a smile.
After the interviews the boy from her district will find that her door is locked and she will not be seeing anyone for the rest of the night. He calls her name a few times. Her body is a stone and her heart is lead.
I simply have to do this alone.
When the alarm goes off and the tributes start running, she is careful to grab a backpack and a knife and scurry into a tree. The cannons beat alongside her heart, telling her that half of them are already gone at the hands of the Careers.
When she sees the face of the boy from her district in the sky that first night, she wishes she could have been surprised. But he was all reaction, no thought; even if she'd never agreed to his request, had never been with him alone, she would have known that.
But she is surprised when she finds herself wondering if she should cry.
One of the first things she learns is that the woods in 5 and the woods here are entirely different. These woods are thicker, rougher. The only thing that is the same is the iodine to purify the water. Other than that, this is entirely new.
Every time she thinks she hears the whirr of a camera in a tree or by a bird or in a rock, she races to leave it, remembering what her mentor said.
"If they can't find you, then they can't kill you."
She was right about the girl from 12 having a target on her back. For a while the boy with the bread is allying himself with the sparkling Careers—to protect her from them, she supposes. He seemed overly sentimental in his interview, willing to have his emotions written all over his face as he told Caesar Flickerman how much he loved the girl on fire.
Emotion is a luxury she could never afford.
When the food in her pack runs out, it gets hard, gets so hard. Everything about the plant test in the training center—that berry bush is poisonous, that one isn't; you can eat that leaf, but that one will give you hives—is running away from her now.
She feels like her brain is slowly shrinking. At night she feels blood pounding against the temples of her forehead.
She drinks water to fill up her stomach, but she can't do it forever. All the lavish Capitol food in the world didn't know how to stick to a body so small, and she doesn't have a cushion of fat to shield her from the cold.
When she sleeps she remembers the Games that took place in the snow, the tributes sinking into hypothermia and starvation, putting ash in their mouths when their fires died out—
No.
But she cannot find food alone. For a heartbeat she allows herself to despair.
That night, she finds the Careers' stockpile.
The first time she is next to it, it is hard to resist taking everything. But she takes enough for small meals, comes back to dance over the mines for snacks, for apples and cheese and bread. And though it is all oddly warm or stale, she gorges it down like it's the last food she'll ever eat.
And then, after she's gotten accustomed to the food, some of the best food she's ever eaten, the girl from 12 sets the whole pile of it on fire.
And she laughs. Because of course Katniss Everdeen couldn't resist.
Of course she couldn't.
The day they announce they have food for her—you all need something desperately—she sprints out into the field before everyone else and hides in a tree to gorge herself on all the food because it has been solong.
There's bread from back home, she knows because she can taste the water from the stream that runs near the community home. And apples, ripe red-yellow ones from 11. And cheese from the Capitol, likely her mentor's doing.
Twenty minutes later she throws it all up.
The next few days she stumbles over tree branches and claws at dirt. At night she crosses her arms over her chest and sobs quietly, thinking about the food in the Capitol.
I simply cannot do it alone.
There are no more parachutes for her.
The day she finds the boy with the bread and the girl on fire, she is too weak to even hold up her knife.
(She remembers thinking a long time ago that she would carve smiles into their cheeks when she killed them, that she would find all the bodies she'd killed and leave the smiles there, her signature marks, while she lay in hedonism in the Victor's Village in 5.
How many days ago was that? Seven? …Eight?
She can't remember. She feels like she may have been a different person then.)
Make it stop, she thinks.
I just want it to be over.
Nightlock, it occurs to her suddenly when she holds the berries in her hands. This is nightlock.
The ability to smell the poison in nightlock, she remembers, is a genetic trait. She sniffs. She smells nuts, not juice.
Lucky me.
She uses the last of her strength to put them in her mouth.